For years, the community of East Austin would stroll to Rosewood Park, a public space in the area, and celebrate Juneteenth. But lately, as housing costs in the neighborhood have jumped, some have been forced to move away, adding challenges to the way they can mark the day.
This year’s Juneteenth event—which commemorates the news of the abolition of slavery—will take place on June 15. The community celebrates with a parade and a gathering at Rosewood Park.
“Where gentrification, what it has done is all the people that used to live in the area that we do the event used to be able to walk to the event,” Lee Dawson Jr. Vice President of Greater East Austin Youth Association, an organizer of the event, told Newsweek. “Now that gentrification has happened, they’ve moved out to the put land areas, so now they have to drive into the area and find places to park and do all that.”
The youth association has been helping to organize the event for two decades. Dawson said that expensive housing was pushing people away from the area.
“What’s making them move further away is the price for housing,” he told Newsweek in a phone interview. “It’s getting too expensive for some people that’s a single household to be able to live in East Austin.”
That includes rental costs and people being able to afford to buy a home, he added.
Folks could buy a home in the area for under $50,000 in 1995, Dawson said.
“Now, you can’t find a house under $300,000,” he said.
The resulting effect of such high housing costs is the make-up of the community in East Austin is changing.
“As far as the African-American or the Latino community, a lot of them are moving outside of the Austin area,” Dawson said. “And it’s not only East Austin, it’s Austin period, that we have a downfall in the African-American community,” Dawson said.
Austin has seen a rise in prices for housing, a development that escalated during the pandemic when an influx of migrants from other parts of the country created competition for homes which in turn helped to push the prices of rental homes and houses available for sale.
Dawson said inflation has also impacted the cost of holding the Juneteenth event post-COVID.
“All the prices going up for everything that we have to do there, for the entertainment and all that, it’s getting harder and harder to get sponsors for the event,” Dawson said. “Since the pandemic, you know, the prices for our entertainment has gone over 100 percent from what we were paying…Everything is going up.”
Dawson said that it was important to hold the event to maintain the connections the community has developed over the years.
“We are still here. We are still trying to do the best we can to be able to put this on so that way families can come to celebrate,” he told Newsweek. “You may find friends that you haven’t seen in a few years because everybody moved away and this is time to come and celebrate and just talk [and] gather.”
The gathering had also become a place for young people in the community to be inspired and learn from their elders who have grown up in the area, Dawson said.
“It’s important because a lot of information is being lost for our young ones that’s coming up, you know, that’s my kids, my grandkids. This is the time for them to be able to get together, to see other people in the community,” Dawson said. “That includes your city manager and all of them. This is a time for them to be able to meet with some of those people, be able to talk to them and see what it takes to get to that level.”
Those connections can be inspirational, he said.
“That way our young wants to know that it is possible for them to be able to become city manager, become the mayor of the city of Austin or somewhere else,” Dawson said. “You know, we do have a lot of people for them to be able to look up to.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The post Texas Juneteenth Celebration Threatened as Black People Leave Austin appeared first on Newsweek.